I ran into an issue the other day and I needed a solution for automically configuring my SSIS packages from securely stored DBMS connection strings. Problem is that most DBMSs don’t support Integrated Authentication—they require a username and password. Storing the username/password combo in the connection string in plain text is a security risk, ...

It's well-known by now that SQL Server 2005 and 2008 include new encryption-related statements that allow you to create and administer encryption keys. You can use CREATE CERTIFICATE to create or import a certificate or DROP ASYMMETRIC KEY to remove an asymmetric key from the database, for instance. One of the interesting ommissions ...

In my last post I talked about how to work around a couple of the limitations of SQL Server encryption by using SQL CLR and the .NET Framework to encrypt a BLOB value (up to 2.1 GB in size), using any supported algorithm you choose. In the example I used AES to encrypt data using a passphrase. SQL Server 2008 also allows you to generate ...